We all have that one alias or shell function we’ve quietly copy-pasted into every new machine for years. The little quality-of-life trick that makes you irrationally happy every time it saves you three keystrokes.
Drop your favorite alias, one-liner, or shell function below and tell us what it does, bonus points if it’s something you cooked up yourself and didn’t just steal from a dotfiles repo (we won’t judge if you did though). 
alias ll="ls -lAhF --group-directories-first"
Nothing groundbreaking but having directories sorted to the top and hidden files visible by default just makes navigating so much smoother. I tried switching to eza at one point but honestly kept coming back to this.
Here are my favorites ones:
alias update=“sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade”
alias ls=“ls -alF”
believe it or not c is one of my most common alias commands.
alias c=‘clear;pwd’
I have various ls aliases that are also very frequently used, on Endeavour OS where I happen to be at the moment, here’s how I implemented them on this system.
alias l=‘ls -al’
alias ll=‘ls -l’
I vary those, depending on what I’m doing.
alias u is another VERY common alias that I use; again I alter this one depending on which distribution I’m using. On antiX, I use it with apt commands; here on Endeavour OS, the following:
alias u=‘yay -Syu’
alias cls=clear
alias ltr=‘ls -latr’
alias hello=‘cd; clear; fastfetch’
update=‘apt clean all; apt update; apt -y upgrade’
i have many alias for my favorite directorys like
vm
dock
data
dev
learn
alias ..=‘cd ..’
alias …=‘cd ../..’
alias …=‘cd ../../..’
alias home=‘cd ~’
alias root=‘cd /’
alias logs=‘cd /var/log’
alias topu=‘top -u $USER’
alias psa=‘ps aux’
@Blue_bird I love your alias commands. I may add a few of them to my collection.
Indeed, these are great guys. Thanks for sharing.
Will be referencing you guys in an article tomorrow:
The LinuxCommunity.io forum thread on favorite aliases and functions collected some solid contributions worth adding to your own setup. Here are the highlights.
toadie swaps ls for lsd, a modern ls replacement with icons and color output:
alias ls="lsd -lah --header"
toadie also uses short named aliases for frequently visited directories, one per project or location:
alias vm='cd ~/vm'
alias dock='cd ~/docker'
alias dev='cd ~/dev'
alias learn='cd ~/learn'
Once you have more than a handful of project directories, this pattern beats cd-ing through long paths every time.
I used a version of ll that sorts directories to the top:
alias ll="ls -lAhF --group-directories-first"
Small change from the standard ll, but having directories sorted above files makes scanning large directories noticeably faster.
Gopinath Pigili adds a few location shortcuts and a per-user top view:
alias home='cd ~'
alias root='cd /'
alias logs='cd /var/log'
alias topu='top -u $USER'
alias psa='ps aux'
topu is a neat one. It filters top to show only your own processes, useful on shared systems where other users’ processes clutter the output.
Brian Masinick keeps a simple c alias that clears the screen and prints the current directory in one shot:
alias c='clear;pwd'
He also uses a short u alias mapped to the update command for whichever distro he’s on at the time, swapping it out per machine. Same principle as the distro-specific update aliases covered above, just taken further.
J J Sloan has a hello alias that makes for a satisfying login sequence:
alias cls=clear
alias ltr='ls -latr'
alias hello='cd; clear; fastfetch'`
hello drops you to home, clears the screen, and fires fastfetch for a system info summary. Good for a fresh terminal orientation. ltr sorts files by modification time with the most recently changed at the bottom, useful when you want to see what changed and when.